Post by Okwes on Jan 11, 2006 15:37:23 GMT -5
Ethnographic images explore an unsettling cultural exchange
www.boston.com/ae/theater_arts/articles/2004/11/12/ethnographic_images_explore_an_unsettling_cultural_exchange/
By Cate McQuaid, Globe Correspondent | November 12, 2004
Photographers Andrea Robbins and Max Becher, who have work up at the
Bernard Toale Gallery, are anthropologists of a sort. They document
explosions of one culture within another, which occur through migration,
colonialism, but also through odder means, such as appropriation.
They've photographed a town in Washington that sells itself as Bavarian,
with chalet-style architecture, signage in a Germanic font, and
lederhosen worn during parades -- even though the town has no historic
ties to Germany. Their work examines the strange gaps and attractions
between societies with a cool, deadpan eye.
That particular interest in German culture (Becher is from Dsseldorf,
the son of Bernd and Hilla Becher, the legendary photographers of
industrial sites) shows up in the pair's exhibition at Toale, ''German
Indians." Certain people in Germany enjoy dressing up in traditional
Native American garb. This does not spring from any informed sympathy
with the history and culture of America's indigenous populations. It
arose from cowboy-and-Indian pulp novels written in the 19th century by
Karl May, who portrayed the Indians as noble savages. As Robbins and
Becher have pointed out, while American kids grew up playing heroic
cowboys, German kids grew up playing heroic Indians.
The color photographs are ethnographic; they observe but do not judge.
At the same time, to an American eye, they're comic; these people look
wildly out of place. ''Knife Thrower" shows a pale older fellow with a
full, gray mustache stooped under the weight of his headdress, which
features what looks like a bison pelt with horns, strung with a variety
of other pelts.
Why have the Germans identified for more than 100 years with this
romanticized ideal of the American Indian? It's especially odd to
consider in light of the Holocaust, and the closest American parallel to
that horrific period -- the treatment of Native Americans. Robbins and
Becher spotlight such dissonances, offering photographs that make you
laugh because they are so unsettling.
Toale sets up a delightful counterpoint to the photography show with
James Esber's ''The Lincoln Project." Esber appropriates images from
popular culture, goes inside them and pushes at the edges, subverting
the visual lingo we take for granted. In this case, it's images of
Abraham Lincoln. In drawings, he pushes the gaunt and harrowed Lincoln
visage as far as he can without losing recognition. ''Lincoln #16" takes
a page from Picasso, with one eye rotating, multiplying, and dropping
down the great emancipator's cheek.
Esber is best known for his Plasticine pieces. He masterfully
manipulates the Play-Doh-like material into psychedelic patterns, from
which shadows and highlights emerge to reveal Lincoln. These suggest how
far Lincoln's image has strayed from the real man and drive home how
every image and idea in the public sphere is mere putty, to be shaped
according to society's needs.
ill Moser describes her work as an investigation of ''the behavioral
quality of line." Her tense, lovely drawings and monotypes at osp
gallery demonstrate how a gesture can become a character, and an
abstract work a narrative. Moser's mark, most often, is a tightly coiled
but occasionally rough and sloppy line. Its contractions and stretches
carry an anxious, sometimes angry energy.
The drawings are more assertive, more active; the monotypes, inspired by
Roland Barthe's ''A Lover's Discourse," are meditative sketches
exploring the possibilities of relationship. In the drawing ''Bluing," a
white line on watery blue, the interaction between that coil and the
shimmer of blue, the figure and ground, is most dramatic. A broad
gesture of the line, crossing from left to right, echoes in the
background, like ripples in water after a pebble drops.
The coupling of gestures in the monotypes is sometimes fluid, sometimes
fractured. In one, a triangular coil appears to be wagging a finger at a
second triangle. In another, two horizontal coils on left and right,
each a luxurious deep blue, connect at a horizon line -- one is more
beneath the surface, one more above.
For all their linear energy, there's something evanescent about Moser's
works -- as if each potently captures one moment, but does not cling to
it, and who knows what will come next?
Paint and pixels
Michael Yoder is a painter's painter. His works at Gallery Katz are
stunning displays of paint application -- all done by hand and brush,
although they do suggest a pixilated world disintegrating. Yoder takes
digital pictures, then fools around with them on the computer, for
inspiration. His images are based on these pictures; his intent is to
walk between abstraction and representation. Sometimes he's more
effective than others. ''Cork" looks from a distance like a man, head
bent, arms crossed. But up close, he turns into tiny bits and swirls of
paint.
Yoder also plays with figure and ground: What often looks like
calligraphy or pattern atop a more solid rush of color (as in ''The
Weight of One") can turn out, on close examination, to be not on the
surface but a deeper level of paint, protected by tape from the overlay
of color, then revealed when the tape was removed.
There is a lot happening in these paintings, in the intricacy of the
painting process and in their bright, hot tones. ''As We Go Up, We Go
Down" is a wild pinwheel of colors. When Yoder can make a clear
reference to representation, as in ''Cork," that intensity works. When
that reference isn't clear, all that virtuosic technique comes up empty.
www.boston.com/ae/theater_arts/articles/2004/11/12/ethnographic_images_explore_an_unsettling_cultural_exchange/
By Cate McQuaid, Globe Correspondent | November 12, 2004
Photographers Andrea Robbins and Max Becher, who have work up at the
Bernard Toale Gallery, are anthropologists of a sort. They document
explosions of one culture within another, which occur through migration,
colonialism, but also through odder means, such as appropriation.
They've photographed a town in Washington that sells itself as Bavarian,
with chalet-style architecture, signage in a Germanic font, and
lederhosen worn during parades -- even though the town has no historic
ties to Germany. Their work examines the strange gaps and attractions
between societies with a cool, deadpan eye.
That particular interest in German culture (Becher is from Dsseldorf,
the son of Bernd and Hilla Becher, the legendary photographers of
industrial sites) shows up in the pair's exhibition at Toale, ''German
Indians." Certain people in Germany enjoy dressing up in traditional
Native American garb. This does not spring from any informed sympathy
with the history and culture of America's indigenous populations. It
arose from cowboy-and-Indian pulp novels written in the 19th century by
Karl May, who portrayed the Indians as noble savages. As Robbins and
Becher have pointed out, while American kids grew up playing heroic
cowboys, German kids grew up playing heroic Indians.
The color photographs are ethnographic; they observe but do not judge.
At the same time, to an American eye, they're comic; these people look
wildly out of place. ''Knife Thrower" shows a pale older fellow with a
full, gray mustache stooped under the weight of his headdress, which
features what looks like a bison pelt with horns, strung with a variety
of other pelts.
Why have the Germans identified for more than 100 years with this
romanticized ideal of the American Indian? It's especially odd to
consider in light of the Holocaust, and the closest American parallel to
that horrific period -- the treatment of Native Americans. Robbins and
Becher spotlight such dissonances, offering photographs that make you
laugh because they are so unsettling.
Toale sets up a delightful counterpoint to the photography show with
James Esber's ''The Lincoln Project." Esber appropriates images from
popular culture, goes inside them and pushes at the edges, subverting
the visual lingo we take for granted. In this case, it's images of
Abraham Lincoln. In drawings, he pushes the gaunt and harrowed Lincoln
visage as far as he can without losing recognition. ''Lincoln #16" takes
a page from Picasso, with one eye rotating, multiplying, and dropping
down the great emancipator's cheek.
Esber is best known for his Plasticine pieces. He masterfully
manipulates the Play-Doh-like material into psychedelic patterns, from
which shadows and highlights emerge to reveal Lincoln. These suggest how
far Lincoln's image has strayed from the real man and drive home how
every image and idea in the public sphere is mere putty, to be shaped
according to society's needs.
ill Moser describes her work as an investigation of ''the behavioral
quality of line." Her tense, lovely drawings and monotypes at osp
gallery demonstrate how a gesture can become a character, and an
abstract work a narrative. Moser's mark, most often, is a tightly coiled
but occasionally rough and sloppy line. Its contractions and stretches
carry an anxious, sometimes angry energy.
The drawings are more assertive, more active; the monotypes, inspired by
Roland Barthe's ''A Lover's Discourse," are meditative sketches
exploring the possibilities of relationship. In the drawing ''Bluing," a
white line on watery blue, the interaction between that coil and the
shimmer of blue, the figure and ground, is most dramatic. A broad
gesture of the line, crossing from left to right, echoes in the
background, like ripples in water after a pebble drops.
The coupling of gestures in the monotypes is sometimes fluid, sometimes
fractured. In one, a triangular coil appears to be wagging a finger at a
second triangle. In another, two horizontal coils on left and right,
each a luxurious deep blue, connect at a horizon line -- one is more
beneath the surface, one more above.
For all their linear energy, there's something evanescent about Moser's
works -- as if each potently captures one moment, but does not cling to
it, and who knows what will come next?
Paint and pixels
Michael Yoder is a painter's painter. His works at Gallery Katz are
stunning displays of paint application -- all done by hand and brush,
although they do suggest a pixilated world disintegrating. Yoder takes
digital pictures, then fools around with them on the computer, for
inspiration. His images are based on these pictures; his intent is to
walk between abstraction and representation. Sometimes he's more
effective than others. ''Cork" looks from a distance like a man, head
bent, arms crossed. But up close, he turns into tiny bits and swirls of
paint.
Yoder also plays with figure and ground: What often looks like
calligraphy or pattern atop a more solid rush of color (as in ''The
Weight of One") can turn out, on close examination, to be not on the
surface but a deeper level of paint, protected by tape from the overlay
of color, then revealed when the tape was removed.
There is a lot happening in these paintings, in the intricacy of the
painting process and in their bright, hot tones. ''As We Go Up, We Go
Down" is a wild pinwheel of colors. When Yoder can make a clear
reference to representation, as in ''Cork," that intensity works. When
that reference isn't clear, all that virtuosic technique comes up empty.